I presented my thesis for the final time this semester last Friday to an audience of roughly 10 professors (including my four committee members) and 20 additional students, including my own classmates. To recap, the thesis is a year-long research project in the Graduate Building Science program at USC; my project, in particular, is devoted to finding a way to communicate with the public in general, and single-family homeowners specifically, about energy-saving design strategies for their homes. I am attempting to do this through the design of a web site that I have dubbed the Green Design Collective, the tagline of which is currently "empowering your community to save energy through design," and the main thrust of which is to present and educate people about architectural solutions for saving energy. As President-Elect Obama said in the second Presidential debate on October 7, “each and every one of us can start thinking about how can we save energy in our homes, in our buildings" ... my thesis is just one attempt to get this effort underway.

As mentioned previously, the web site is not up and running yet but I hope to get it going soon. In the meantime I will share with you one image from my presentation that I enjoy - it's an image that I created of the hypothetical iPhone app that my web site could eventually lead to. One of the things I tried to convey in my presentation was that global warming is not the problem of the individual anymore; it's a global problem. So I was trying to think about how something like this could be effective on multiple platforms, and this image helped me get my point across:


The response to my project was largely positive. One of the best suggestions that I heard was to see if I could get corporate sponsorship for this endeavor - in this respect, it could be beneficial for me (by getting financial support) and for the company that sponsored me (because they could use it to advertise their products). To this I responded, "that's great, but I don't know many CEOs!" Point being, if you are a CEO and you would like to sponsor my project, please drop me a line!

So now I am basically on break: I am trying to get some more of my thesis document written but aside from that, the next several weeks will be devoted to cleaning up some computer problems and working on my web site as much as I can. And maybe starting to look for jobs, god help me. Oh and going home, eating a bunch of food, and exchanging gifts and all that. I suspect I will do at least one post from the Midwest to keep you entertained. Until then, please have a look at this brilliant poem The Night Before Layoffs. Happy Holidays, and here's to hoping everyone who has a job, keeps it...